Book Cover Image:
Painting of the Walter Hood by Eric McGraffin
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The lively times and untimely end
of the clipper ship Walter Hood 1852-1870

by GRANVILLE ALLEN MAWER

"This book tells the story of one of the thousands of sailing ships that for more than sixty years were European Australia's only link with "home" and for even longer sustained the infant colonies and carried their products to the world.

Why single out the Walter Hood? She was not a famous ship. a household name of the day like Marco Polo, Lightning or Thermopylae. In the newspaper terminology of the 1850's and 1860's her status was that of "favourite vessel" and "regular trader", familiar and reliable. What marked her for attention, then as now, was the dramatic episode that ended her career. It is a good story, often told and often embellished, but there is also interest in the circumstances of her conception, the expectations held for her and the long, hard years that preceded those few days of sensation, for the Walter Hood sailed in stirring times. Hers is a small but significant part in the history of the last great age of sail and Australia's first great boom."
Source : A section from The Preface of the book.

"The Walter Hood was one of the flying clippers which in the latter half of the nineteenth century captured the public imagination in Australia and Britain with their speed and beauty. The oceans of the world became their regatta courses as they raced each other and the early steamers to distant ports for tea, gold and wool. The Walter Hood was the first Aberdeen clipper of what became the classic thousand ton class.

Great expectations were held of the ship and although she failed in the China tea trade for which she was designed she redeemed herself with seventeen years profitable service on the London-Sydney run. She was wrecked in mysterious circumstances near Ulladulla on the south coast of Australia in 1870, only a few months after the event that signalled the end of the sailing era - the opening of the Suez Canal.

It was not the end of her. The Walter Hood lived on in folk memory and commemoration. To this day her loss and the events which followed it remain a question of abiding local interest.

In this book Allen Mawer has put local knowledge into its historical context and has come up with a yarn that will appeal to all with an interest in the sea and the great sailing ships of yesteryear."
Source : The back cover of the book.

The book was dedicated to the crew of the Pastiche Towers,
high and dry a mile south of the Walter Hood.

First published in 1994 by Plainwords Press, Hughes ACT Australia

Copyright Granville Allen Mawer, 1994.